Scientists discover ‘strange structures’ in Milky Way that could help us better understand…

NEW DELHI: An international team of astrophysicists has discovered something wholly new in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
The scientists have spotted hundreds of horizontal ‘filaments‘ (slender, elongated bodies of luminous gas), each measuring 5 to 10 light-years in length, radiating from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
This discovery could provide more insights into the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation, furthering our understanding of the galaxy’s nucleus.
Vertical filaments discovered in 1980s
The findings come nearly 40 years after Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, the study’s lead author, and other researchers discovered a similar group of nearly 1,000 filaments, which are vertical and much larger at up to 150 light-years long each, near the galaxy’s center.
Although the two populations of filaments share several similarities, Yusef-Zadeh assumes they have different origins.
While the vertical filaments sweep through the galaxy, towering up to 150 light-years high, the horizontal filaments look more like the dots and dashes of Morse code, punctuating only one side of Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.
The study was published on June 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
‘I was stunned’
“It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” Yusef-Zadeh said.
“I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves. And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole. By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation. It is satisfying when one finds order in a middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy.”
An expert in radio astronomy, Yusef-Zadeh is a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of CIERA.
Advancement in radio astronomy
Yusef-Zadeh credits the flood of new discoveries to enhanced radio astronomy technology, particularly the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (SARAO) MeerKAT telescope. To pinpoint the filaments, Yusef-Zadeh’s team used a technique to remove the background and smooth the noise from MeerKAT images in order to isolate the filaments from surrounding structures.
“The new MeerKAT observations have been a game changer,” he said. “The advancement of technology and dedicated observing time have given us new information. It’s really a technical achievement from radio astronomers.”
The new discovery is filled with unknowns, and Yusef-Zadeh’s work to unravel its mysteries has just begun.
For now, he can only consider a plausible explanation of the new population’s mechanisms and origins.
“We think they must have originated with some kind of outflow from an activity that happened a few million years ago,” Yusef-Zadeh said. “It seems to be the result of an interaction of that outflowing material with objects near it. Our work is never complete. We always need to make new observations and continually challenge our ideas and tighten up our analysis.”
(With inputs from agencies)